First Prize: An Inspiring Mystery Novel
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Many fans of Ayn Rand’s novels experience the shock of emerging from her ideal world only to face the somewhat gray reality of their contemporary culture. After encountering Rand’s characters, with their un-breached integrity and unsullied innocence, it can be difficult to handle a culture of elusive intellectuals, business-as-usual politicians, and perverse artists. It is a challenge to preserve one’s sense of uprightness against constant affronts.
This challenge is won by Chess Hanrahan, the protagonist of Edward Cline’s mystery novel First Prize (published 1988 by The Mysterious Press). Hanrahan is a former New York police detective who, at the beginning of the story, has retreated to a small New England university town after having realized that the New York District Attorney was more interested in blasting him than the killers he had removed from the streets.
He is resigned to live the rest of his life as the chief of police in a place that does not require policing, until the murder of a professor — which Hanrahan solves in short order — leads him to undergo a change of heart. Inspired by his successful closing of the case, Hanrahan decides to returns to New York to face the world that had chased him away. He opens a private investigator's office in Manhattan and finds himself investigating the literary publishing business.
Hanrahan is hired by the Granville Foundation to investigate the disappearance of Gregory Compton, a writer who has just won the prestigious Granville award for fiction. Compton has not claimed the award, and the Granville Foundation is eager to find him.
As Hanrahan investigates the circumstances of Compton’s disappearance, he enters the shady world of literary publishing, with its backroom deals and moral compromises. Compton’s agent, sixty-something Gussie Spendler, appears to be the only decent human being in a desert of dried-out souls.
Talking to Gussie about Compton and visiting Compton's flat in Queens, Hanrahan learns that Compton lived in poverty, working as a waiter or temporary office worker to support himself. Reading Compton's books, Hanrahan is struck by the strength of the author's spirit. Compton created an enchanting literary world where even the villains are admirable. The book that won the Granville award, Walk Around the Sun, tells the story of the composer Stridivant who lives for his music and succeeds against incredible odds.
Compton’s novels were published after countless rejections and desperate deals maneuvered by Spendler. Walk Around the Sun is the nemesis of the novels praised by the literary establishment, including most of the scholars who served on the Granville Foundation’s jury. How could it possibly have won their votes?
Hanrahan’s quest for an answer leads him to another question: Would someone like Compton even wish to win the Granville prize? Of what value could an award from the literary establishment be to him? (The second place was awarded to Partly Cloudy Over Kansas, where nothing happens for 548 pages and then a tornado hits.) The mystery is compounded when Hanrahan’s investigation escalates to include murder.
Cline’s portrayal of contemporary literary standards is unflattering but realistic. To fully appreciate how oppressive is the literary establishment that voted James Joyce’s Ulysses best novel of the twentieth century, consider this quote from an interview with novelist A. S. Byatt, author of Possession:
I was very much defending realism against the rather trivial kind of experimental novels that were then going on in England. There was a very talented young writer called B.S. Johnson who is now dead; he killed himself, I think, at the beginning of the '70s. He was writing things like "James Joyce was the Einstein of the novel. It will never again be possible to give people names, or to write narrative that goes forward, or to describe things." (Salon.com’s interview with A.S. Byatt, February 15, 1996)
Gregory Compton was immune to the oppressive weight of the literary elite, as is the rejuvenated Hanrahan. Some of Compton’s friends were not immune, however. There is Jeffrey Sayers, the moody struggling playwright who had become dependent on Compton, feeding off Compton’s strength. There is Compton’s glamorous girlfriend Rhea Hamilton, who would not heed Compton’s assurances that he did not care about the rejections, the poverty, the temporary jobs, and did not need her help.
Rhea Hamilton’s attitude toward Compton is reminiscent of Dominique Francon’s attitude toward Roark in The Fountainhead, except that Rhea’s weakness overcomes her virtues. She is a Dominique Francon gone wrong. Watching her reclining on a sofa, Hanrahan envisions her as “a tigress in repose.” Yet she is crushed by Compton’s failure to achieve public recognition.
Hanrahan is initially reminiscent of Eddie Willers in Atlas Shrugged, who knows that something is wrong with the world, but cannot decipher the answer or face it. Hanrahan wonders what is wrong in a world that has no use for Gregory Compton, but ultimately, unlike Eddie Willers, he has the strength to unravel the truth and face its implications.
First Prize is written as a first person narration by Hanrahan, creating an immediate bond between him and the reader. When Hanrahan describes his face, he comments: “I had no opinion on my face, other than that I liked it and that no one should have any reason to fear it” (p. 1). It is interesting to compare this description to the way Rand describes her ideal man as having “a face without fear.”
The novel is an original attempt to present a rational ethics in the form of a murder mystery set in New York City in the 1980s. The story is so captivating, even The New York Times literary reviewer admitted grudgingly that the book is worthwhile: “[T]here are better murder mysteries to be written about literary prizes, but this one will do for the time being.” (The New York Times, May 6, 1988)
Edward Cline had written three more Chess Hanrahan novels as sequels to First Prize, but has not been able to get them published. (The Mysterious Press was bought by Warner Books.) Perhaps another publisher will recognize the merit of Chess Hanrahan and enable the sequels to inspire more readers.
Michelle Fram Cohen, a native of Israel, has lived in the United States since 1981. She holds an M.A. in Comparative Literature and works as a computer programmer and a freelance translator and writer. Her writings have been published in Navigator, The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, and Full Context. She currently resides in Maryland with her husband and son.
